I just thank God for every day and all the time I had with the guys that aren’t with us anymore.” You know it’s coming, and it’s coming to you, too. As you get older, you get a little more used to it. “We’ve been doing this a long time, so you just kind of do what you do. “We just kind of fell back in,” says Rossington. Unfortunately, coping with loss is familiar to this band. Gary, Rickey and myself just said ‘let’s go for it, let’s get this thing done.’” These songs needed to be out there, this record needed to be made. “But we got through it, as Lynyrd Skynyrd seems to always do. Returning to the studio after the death of Powell, whose keyboards can be heard on more than half the songs on God & Guns, was “very difficult, I ain’t gonna lie to you,” says Van Zant. “We wanted to show the people that not only are we doing the old material, keeping the music going, but we still have some new tricks up our sleeves, too,” says founding guitarist Gary Rossington. With a catalog of over 60 albums and sales beyond 30 million, Lynyrd Skynyrd remains a cultural icon that appeals to all generations, and God & Guns is a fitting addition to the canon. But that would not be the way of this Rock & Roll Hall of Fame powerhouse. With the passing of Powell and Evans, “a lot of people probably expected us to say enough is enough,” admits Medlocke. Since then, the band tragically lost Allen Collins, Leon Wilkeson and Hughie Thomasson, yet they rock on. Recorded in Nashville in 2008-2009, the project was interrupted-but, tellingly, not ended-by the deaths of founding member/keyboardist Billy Powell and longtime bassist Ean Evans earlier this year.ĭriven by core members Gary Rossington (guitar), Johnny Van Zant (vocals) and Rickey Medlocke (guitar), along with longtime drummer Michael Cartellone, Lynyrd Skynyrd have recorded an album (“under duress, as usual,” according to Van Zant) that very much lives up to the legacy begun some 35 years ago in Jacksonville, Florida, and halted for a decade by the 1977 plane crash that killed three band members, including Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines.
With their first set of new studio material since 2003’s Vicious Cycle, legendary rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd returns with God & Guns, due out September 29 on Loud & Proud/Roadrunner Records.
About survival of spirit unbowed, uniquely American, stubbornly resolute. Beyond the tragedy, the history, the raging guitars and the killer songs, ultimately, Lynyrd Skynyrd is about an indomitable will.
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